A couple of years back I read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake and it was one of my best reads of the year. I think she is a really fascinating person and an exceptional writer. Her style of storytelling is so engaging. Maybe it is in part that she has a different world view, one different than my own yet presented in a very relatable manner. She was born in the UK to Bengali Indian parents and raised in the US. In a sense she straddles more than one culture and is now adding yet another. I imagine she must juggle her Bengali side with her American/English speaking side, but she has also learned Italian and has immersed herself into that culture as well.
I have been reading about her experiences learning to speak and read the Italian language, and now she has begun writing in Italian and translating Italian novels into English. She even lives in Italy now as well. I'm in the middle of two of her more recent books--In Other Words (a bilingual edition with the Italian and English side by side) about her love affair with and study of Italian and an essay called The Clothing of Books (which I am going to share a teaser from), which might be her first published work in Italian.
It's interesting reading an author who is writing in a second language when you are familiar with their work in their native tongue. Lahiri has also written about growing up American while being raised in a Bengali-Indian family. In her essay about the design of book jackets, a clothing of sorts, it is her musings on a variety of things. It's interesting in how the prose reads, too, since it was written in Italian and translated into English by her husband Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush. I have just started reading, though I have skimmed a bit ahead so I will have more to say about this, but a few teasers to share now.
She begins by writing about clothes as we know them, the clothes we wear, which have a meaning all their own. Growing up her mother always pressed Jhumpa to wear Bengali clothing to family gatherings, hoping that she would eventually fall into that culture permanently.
"As soon as I put on those clothes I felt like a different person, a foreigner like her. I felt the weight of an imposed identity. Those clothes, which had their own separate space in my closet, had a discordant, showy quality: colors that seemed too bright, material rooted in another land. They were, actually, more elegant than my everyday clothes, but they discomfited me. They tasted of a faraway place. They weighed almost nothings, and yet they weighed on me."
"Throughout this bitter struggle between my mother and myself, of long standing and with no clear resolution, I learned the hard way that how we dress, like the language we speak and the food we eat, expresses our identity, our culture, our sense of belonging."
And then she begins to relate this idea to how publishers clothe the books they publish.
"When my books were first published, when I was thirty-two years old, I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world. But what is wrapped around my words--my book covers--is not of my choosing."
And I think, like most authors, that she doesn't always like what ends up covering her books.
It may be down to the translation, and I think she did rework this essay, but it doesn't exactly feel like it has been translated (her longer, bilingual book I am also reading has a different feel to it). Her writing seems quite lyrical here to me. I am enjoying comparing this shorter work to her longer book of essays/stories that has also been translated. And I am sure I will have more to say about both of them later.